Sixteen members of a Chicago Public Schools advisory committee for Latino students resigned to protest school budget cuts that have landed hard on schools with largely poor and minority populations, the committee's chairman said Wednesday.

"We see this not just as an assault on Latino students, neighborhoods and families, but we see this as a continuation of cuts in the African-American community and now cuts in the Latino community," committee member Jose Rico said while backed by three City Council members and former school board member and interim CPS CEO Jesse Ruiz.

Schools officials responded by saying the schools can use an appeals process to recover money cut by the district. A CPS spokesman said the district expected to lay out how the appeals process would work sometime next week.

"We knew there would be consequences. It became very clear very quickly that some of our schools, and frankly many of our Hispanic schools with large populations and poverty, were disproportionately impacted," school board President Frank Clark said. "Obviously we have to correct that."

The public rebuke by Latino elected officials and prominent community members came before the Chicago Board of Education approved its latest budget for the year, a $5.4 billion spending plan that includes a series of cuts and an expectation that state lawmakers will send $111 million to balance the budget by summer.

District officials have blamed Gov. Bruce Rauner for the cuts, which include a $46 million freeze on non-personnel school spending that Latino leaders targeted Wednesday.

Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune

Northeastern Illinois University professor Ana Gil-Garcia, second from left, and Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, right, listen as Ald. Gilbert Villegas, middle, speaks at a news conference outside the Chicago Board of Education on Feb. 22, 2017. Gil-Garcia is among the members of the Chicago Public Schools Latino Advisory Committee who resigned.

Northeastern Illinois University professor Ana Gil-Garcia, second from left, and Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, right, listen as Ald. Gilbert Villegas, middle, speaks at a news conference outside the Chicago Board of Education on Feb. 22, 2017. Gil-Garcia is among the members of the Chicago Public Schools Latino Advisory Committee who resigned. (Alyssa Pointer / Chicago Tribune)

CPS determined the amount of money schools had to cut in the spending freeze by looking at the money each building held in three accounts: funds received from the district on a per-pupil basis; supplemental state aid meant to help educate low-income students; and federal grant funds.

Those state and federal dollars aren't meant to be used on general operating costs, but are instead intended to keep class sizes low and support learning programs in schools that have a higher number of low-income and minority students.

Schools that didn't have enough money in per-pupil spending accounts had to use the supplemental state and federal dollars to balance their budgets. If poorer schools or buildings with large numbers of English-language learners had not yet spent their state and federal aid, those schools had more money to cut and often got hit hardest by the spending freeze.

"This is about time that the Latino community stands up on its own two feet and says, 'Enough is enough, this has to end,' " Ald. George Cardenas, 12th, told reporters. "We're going to demand changes in CPS leadership and leadership structure. This cannot continue."

Rauner's office has said the governor scuttled a measure that would have provided $215 million to CPS this year because Democratic legislators went back on a deal that tied school aid to broader changes to the state's highly indebted employee retirement system.

CPS CEO Forrest Claypool on Wednesday said the veto forced the district to evaluate options that included cutting teachers or an "uneven distribution of cuts from unspent funds."

"Ultimately given this 'Sophie's Choice,' we chose to protect our teachers, and through them the continued progress of our students," Claypool said. "While we have limited options for making this more fair, we will work with schools to smooth out the most disproportionate impacts."

Rauner's office issued a statement on Wednesday critical of CPS.

"The Rauner Administration strongly condemns cuts implemented by the Chicago Public School District, which were caused by decades of fiscal mismanagement, and disproportionately affected low-income students," spokeswoman Eleni Demertzis said in a statement.

The Latino Advisory Committee was formed in 2014 under former CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett in an effort to bulk up the district's outreach to a growing population within the school system. Rico and Ruiz said the committee had been ignored in the budget-cutting process.

"We understand that these are tough budget decisions, and the role of the council has always been to be able to provide some input and to be able to deliberate on these decisions, and we were not used in that capacity," Rico told reporters before Wednesday's school board meeting.

Ruiz, now president of the Chicago Park District board, said the effects of the budget cuts on predominantly Latino schools and the lack of consultation added "insult to injury."

"These are desperate times not generated by CPS, generated by, in the immediate course, our governor's veto of a bill that would've provided adequate funding this year," Ruiz said before the school board meeting.

"That's the cause of this, that's causing unfortunate decisions to be made. But with making those unfortunate decisions, you have to reach out to the communities that are potentially impacted and seek out, perhaps, alternatives that aren't as disproportionally impactful to certain communities," Ruiz said.